The present invention to a method and apparatus for extracting geothermal fluid.
In the wake of the recent growing interest in the utilization of geothermal energy in Japan, new technology has been established for exploring and exploiting water-dominated dominated geothermal fields and this has caused a rapid increase in the rate of development of geothermal energy in Japan which is abundant with water-dominated geothermal fields. However, the water-dominated geothermal fields in Japan have a fatal inherent defect in that the production capacity of production wells diminishes year by year.
If difficulty is expected in maintaining the desired output of electric power generation from water-dominated geothermal reservoirs as a result of decrease in the steam production at individual production wells, a practice is currently undertaken to compensate for the decrease in steam production from the existing production wells by drilling additional production wells at seemingly promising sites. However, this method is not capable of increasing the initially estimated quantity of hot water or energy that can be extracted from geothermal reservoirs. Therefore, drilling additional production wells inevitably shortens the lifetime over which steam can be produced from reservoirs.
If the quantity of hot water or energy that can be extracted from geothermal reservoirs could be increased, it would become possible to produce more steam for a longer period of time without increasing the number of production wells.